human; nature

Yesterday I ate remarkably delicious Ethiopian food. I started reading--for fun--The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollen. I started getting around my confirmation materials for Jaipur.

I also had two very different, very strange experiences. Involving animals.

Subject A: Baby chicks at the MSI.

My dad had wanted to go to the Museum of Science and Industry. I agreed, even though I find it a bit creepy and hysterically pro-capitalism (the oil and coal exhibits are entirely uncritical, for example, showing kids how the fossil fuels can be "fun"). The miniature Chicago-Seattle train set-up was cool. The WWII German U-boat seemed really interesting, but the tickets for it were sold out.

And then there was the Genetics exhibit. It was fine, mostly. There were lots of interactive displays ("What animal fetus is this? Turn the wheel to find out!") and a little film on the Human Genome Project. Because the museum (as most museums are) was targeted mainly at kids, they also found some reason to put a couple incubators in the Genetics room. The first had several eggs that were starting to hatch; the second featured a dozen or more baby chicks, running around and bumping into each other. Both incubators were surrounded by children and their parents, gasping at the cracking shells and cooing at the clumsy baby chicks. I took a picture on my phone and started thinking about how weird it was... these animals are born to delighted human faces, no mother in sight, and then they run around a tiny octagonal room while people tap on the glass. Signs hung on the walls, explaining how eggs are fertilized, explaining the stages of development. I took a picture on my phone.

And I wondered--How separated from animals are we?

Later that night, I showed A. the picture. She nodded. "Ooh, yeah, the chicks. Did you know they kill them? Yeah, I know someone who worked at the MSI over the summer. Apparently, every Tuesday they come in and remove the baby chicks, and they have nothing to do with them. So they kill them."

?!

Subject B: Grizzly Man

I'd been looking forward to seeing this ever since my sister told me about it a year ago. Telling me about it, she looked really pinched and uncomfortable. She described it as disturbing.

For anyone who doesn't know, Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent 13 consecutive summers in the Alaskan wilderness filming grizzly bears. But he doesn't study them. He simply loves them, in really the most passionate sense of the word. He gets dangerously close, names them and speaks softly to them. He isn't eccentric, in the Steve Irwin nature-man sense. Rather, he seems legitimately mentally ill--possibly bipolar. The disturbing part is the fact that the 13th summer, he gets too close and is mauled to death and then eaten by a starving bear. And his girlfriend goes with him. And it's caught on tape. And described.

Actually, this alone isn't the most disturbing aspect. Everything works together. You hear about his descent into alcoholism and the reinvention of his identity afterward.. his discovery of the beauty of nature causing him to give up alcohol. You see his tension with civilization as he curses wildly, lividly, everyone from the government to the park service for their wrongful treatment of the grizzlies. You see him tenderly stroking the foxes, whispering "I love you, I love you, I love you."

In the end, the documentary wasn't really about Treadwell. It was more about--as filmmaker Herzog describes--"cold indifference". Treadwell seemed to lose contact with his own humanity, seemed to want to be a bear (as many of those interviewed pointed out). The portrayal of Treadwell was sympathetic, but the real message seemed to be the brutal reality of nature.

(I recommend the documentary, by the way. It's hard to really understand unless you watch him.)

Chicks as objects, bears as family. Destroyed chicks, destroyed human.

Which really just hits home the phrase, "the cold indifference of nature."

Regardless, an angry email to the MSI is in order.